ZAIREAN troops were deployed yesterday to close the sprawling Kibumba camp for Rwandan Hutu refugees, but only 41 of its almost 200,000 inhabitants volunteered to return to their tense homeland, relief workers said.
The Zairean government has said it will progressively close a series of camps holding a million Hutus who fled Rwanda's 1994 civil war, and repatriate all volunteers. Kibumba, five km from the border, is the first.
Field staff working for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) were up since daybreak hoping for a mass return, their trucks and provisions ready. But the Hutus despite assurances from the Rwandan government fear vengeance for the genocidal slaughter by extremists during the war that killed more than 500,000 people.
Only some 90,000 have returned since the end of the war, and Rwanda's overcrowded jails are jammed with more than 60,000 Hutus arrested on war crimes charges.
Relief workers said Zairean officials, including the ministers of the interior and defence had failed to persuade the refugees at Kibumba that it would be safe for them to go home, despite numerous meetings.
A UNHCR official said the Zairean soldiers were not committing any abuses, as they did last August, when Zaire expelled 15,000 of the refugees before halting that programme under intense international protest.
Zairean officials say they will seal each camp and later close it after giving its inhabitants a chance to return to Rwanda.
That means the refugees remaining in each camp will be refused permission to leave, according to a statement by the Zairean Interior Minister, Mr Gustave Malumba. They will no longer be able to work in nearby towns, or sell produce there, and no longer be able to collect fire wood an activity that has denuded much of the ecologically fragile Virunga national park, home to rare mountain gorillas.
They will also be barred from undertaking any commercial activities in the camps, which are in effect sprawling cities, complete with restaurants, bars, markets, hairdressing saloons, shops, brothels and churches.
The Zairean government welcomed the refugees at first, but lost patience with them when their presence resulted in local crime waves, despoliation of forests cut down for firewood and economic hardship for Zaireans competing with the refugees in the marketplaces.
David Shanks adds
A message from Concern's director in Rwanda, Mr Dominic MacSorley, expressed little hope that time and money would be invested to promote "a healing process for Rwanda.
Such a process "can only begin by bringing those guilty to justice, adopting acceptable arrest procedures, ensuring some form of fair trial to the thousands that languish in prison and dealing with the issue of land registration."
In the short term, Mr MacSorley hoped the Zaireans would show restraint but said that Concern had contingency plans to cope with 15,000 returnees.
The agency GOAL warned the repatriation "could lead to another human catastrophe". Its director, Mr John O'Shea, called on the Government to exert pressure on the international community to see that the refugees were treated humanely.